Time pressure gradually corrupts an engineer's standard of quality and perfection. It has a detrimental effect on people as well as products

Usually its users discover sooner or later that their program does not deliver all the desired results, or worse, that the results requested were not the ones really needed.

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. (Or, sometimes known by] Grove [the head of Intel] giveth and Gates [the head of Microsoft] taketh away.)

But quality of work can be expected only through personal satisfaction, dedication and enjoyment. In our profession, precision and perfection are not a dispensable luxury, but a simple necessity.

During the process of stepwise refinement, a notation which is natural to the problem in hand should be used as long as possible.

Clearly, programming courses should teach methods of design and construction, and the selected examples should be such that a gradual development can be nicely demonstrated.

But active programming consists of the design of new programs, rather than contemplation of old programs.